But is it (robot) art?

Max Chandler’s robots are designed to take mathematically derived patterns and then use them to produce a painting

Max Chandler gets along just fine with his robot helpers when they are behaving properly

(Image: Chris Hardy/San Francisco Chronicle)

Max Chandler art studio is more chaotic than most. It’s not that he is disorganised&colon; the mess is down to the team of brush-wielding robots that help him paint his pictures. Built from Lego bricks and aluminium, the bots look like miniature trucks and cranes. Some propel themselves on wheels, while others shuffle about on legs. All are capable of exasperating behaviour that sometimes turn peaceful painting sessions into circus-like mayhem.

If the bots are not tracking paint onto the neighbour’s porch, they’re falling clean off the canvas, ruining the flow of the picture. Worse, they always need refills at crucial points in their trajectories, forcing Chandler to scramble to insert a new paint-loaded brush. “Sometimes I think this is the worst way in the world to create a picture,” he chuckles.

Sometimes I think this is the worst way in the world to create a picture

So why go to all this trouble? Although the bots make life more difficult, Chandler says working with them is the only way he can create the pictures he wants. Chandler, who splits his time between Scottsdale, Arizona, and San Francisco, California, is part of a burgeoning community of artists and engineers who use robots to produce paintings. “It’s a new form of art,” says Sherry Turkle, a sociologist and psychologist who studies the impact of technology on culture …